September 29th, 2011
From his review of Moneyball: The Movie:
When my son was ten, his baseball coach—inspired by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game—came up with a statistically brilliant team strategy: Don’t swing. Ever.
Because few ten-year-olds can throw more strikes than balls, his team won the pennant by letting the little boy on the mound walk them around the bases until he dissolved into tears and had to be replaced by another doomed lad.
The next spring, the parents got together and decided not to let that coach return.
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My last year of minor-league little league ball (when dinosaurs romaed the earth), they abolished the walk. Games seemed to take forever.
REPLY
Anonymous Mike September 29, 2011 at 1:21 pm
As a parent I totally agree with this, as a kid though who wasn’t able to hit until 12 years old the only way I could ever get on base was not to swing.
Last year I got stuck coaching a youth flag football team. I had little idea what to do, to top it I didn’t have anyone who could throw the ball more than 10 yards to a teammate (they were 6 graders playing 8th graders) and I was only allowed to practice once a week.
So what did I do?
I realized that since the opposing defense had to start 5 yards behind their side of the line of scrimmage that we could get at least 4+ yards a play by running the ball – even it meant just getting the ball and falling forward. So a guaranteed 3 to 4 yards a play with 50+ yards to go to meant it would take us an entire quarter for a possession. … which was good because when the other team would score in 3 to 4 plays ball control was a must.
We never won a game but by the half-way point in the season when we got the offense going everybody who mattered was jazzed up – my kids, their parents – because we were competitive. The other team hated me and rightfully so because I was gaming the system.
Needless to say I won’t be including this in my memoirs.